Chapter Fifteen, Imperfect Union

Chapter Fifteen

DECIDEDLY, THIS OUGHT TO BE STRUCK OUT

Presidential Aspirants, 1854–1856

Washington, Nantucket, and New York

Jessie spent those months in Washington, preoccupied with her absent spouse. “In midwinter, without any reason, I became possessed by the conviction that he was starving,” she said. The feeling “made a physical effect on me. Sleep and appetite were broken up, and in spite of my father’s and my own efforts to dissipate it by reasoning . . . nothing dulled my sense of increasing suffering from hunger to Mr. Frémont and his party.” She became convinced that she shared a telepathic link with her husband that caused her to feel his suffering. No telepathy was necessary; it was reasonable to assume that her husband was starving, knowing what she did of his previous expedition. “When I have no more anxious thoughts pressing on my heart it will not ache,” she wrote Lizzie Lee. In the same letter she spoke of parenting twelve-year-old Lily, which, needless to say, she was doing alone.

She faced the added stress of a political controversy, which she could not help but take personally; it involved the land John had been crossing and the railroad he was risking his life to advance. At the Capitol a few blocks from the Frémont house, Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas sponsored a bill to organize a government for the Nebraska lands, which his Committee on Territories reported to the Senate on January 4, 1854. Douglas was a frontier lawmaker from Illinois, equally adept at roaring speeches to rural audiences and maneuvering legislation through Congress. He had managed the Compromise of 1850 to completion and brought California into the Union. Now he believed proper government for Nebraska would improve the prospects of building the Pacific railroad across it. But as in 1850, proslavery lawmakers did not want another free state without compensation. Douglas obliged. His bill divided the land into two territories, to be known as Kansas and Nebraska, and although both lay north of the Missouri Compromise line dividing slave territory from free, Douglas agreed to have that compromise repealed. He would leave all questions of slavery to the people who settled there. It was not hard to imagine Kansas, which was farther south, becoming a slave state while Nebraska became a free one.

The Washington Union, the leading organ of the Democratic Party, described it as a “measure of peace and compromise,” but the reaction was anything but peaceful. Horace Greeley’s antislavery New York Tribune assailed the Kansas-Nebraska Act and its Northern author, saying Douglas was not “manly, noble or independent,” and behaved as if “subjection to the slaveholding interest is now the only sure path to political honors and distinction.” Frederick Douglass had been right: many Northerners who were “willing to tolerate slavery inside the slave States” were not willing to be “excluded” by slavery from any new land, not even the remote plains of Kansas. Kansas was known to the public through the travel writing of John C. Frémont, and it sounded attractive: In his first report he described looking down from a bluff at the Kansas River, 230 yards wide. The river was lined by “a broad belt of heavy timber,” and beyond the river valley stretched prairies of “the richest verdure.”

Although the Kansas-Nebraska Act became an official Democratic Party measure that was backed by the president and was soon on its way to passage, it began to crack the party. Frustrated Democrats joined equally frustrated Whigs to discuss forming a new antislavery political party, who would call themselves Republicans. Congressman Thomas Hart Benton was unwilling to go that far, but delivered a speech in the House, thundering far past the hour he had been allotted that the bill would destroy “the peace of the country.” The old lawmaker was so estranged from President Pierce that when the president appointed a new postmaster in St. Louis, Benton stopped using the post office, hiring a private express company instead. He drew closer to antislavery lawmakers, and one evening invited Senator Seward of New York to walk home with him. “I am heart-sick being here,” Seward said. “I look around me in the Senate and find all demoralized,” with many Northern states represented by men who upheld Southern interests. Seward was cheered by his conversation with Benton, the first of a number they would have as they strategized against the Nebraska bill. In a letter to his wife, Seward said he was further cheered when he left Benton’s house and went “over to Mrs. Frémont’s,” which required a separate call, since the Frémonts at last had their own home in Washington, close to the Benton house on C Street. “She is a noble-spirited woman. Has much character. I am sure you would like her. She is very outspoken.” It was notable that Seward had gone to hear the views of Mrs. Frémont, not her husband, who he knew was away in the West.

In April a visitor brought news of John. Almon Babbitt, the Utah territorial secretary who had rescued John’s finances in Parowan, arrived in Washington. He carried a letter from John to Benton, and also visited Jessie, who marveled at Babbitt’s story. Because the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had relocated its people to Utah after careful study of John’s maps and reports, it was partly because of John that the Mormons founded a town in the place where he eventually needed to find one. “Safety had come to him,” she said, “and to those who had entrusted him with their lives, through the results of his previous work.” John had saved himself.

Jessie invited Babbitt to return for dinner, and invited Francis Preston Blair to join them. (She dryly asked Blair to “forget he has lots of wives,” which was assuming too much; the Mormon appeared to have one wife.) She instructed Blair to bring Lizzie and her husband. It was a perfect Washington dinner, so gracefully arranged that Jessie’s various purposes might not be noticed. The Saturday meal would reward Babbitt, a Democrat, with an introduction to Blair, who was a living link to Jackson, the party founder. Blair would make a political connection in Utah. And Jessie could gratify her friends with firsthand news of her husband.

JOHN REACHED HOME IN LATE SPRING, which allowed him to support Jessie in her mother’s final months. Elizabeth Benton, who had taught Jessie to despise slavery and likely influenced her husband’s growing opposition to it, died on September 10, 1854. Because of her long illness, the family had been “deprived of her companionship” for years, as Jessie put it; the end may have come as a relief, although that was not something Jessie wanted to express. “How great a loss this was . . . can only be known to those who knew her.”

Her father understandably remained in Washington during Elizabeth’s final months, though he faced reelection in Missouri. Benton’s organization handled the campaign for him and added a special new feature. He had long wanted political party nominees to be chosen by voters, not by party conventions or caucuses, and that year St. Louis Democrats held what was called a “primary election,” arguably the first of its kind in the nation. Benton was nominated without opposition. But the general election was different. As the political parties fractured, a new political movement had been gaining strength, formed of groups opposed to immigration. Benton’s challenger, a former mayor of St. Louis, collected both Whig and anti-immigrant support. In the election on August 7, Benton was defeated. The telegraph sped the news to Washington, adding that as the votes were counted, “a riot was then taking place.” The riot had started on election day, when an election judge slowed down voting by scrutinizing the naturalization papers of voters in an Irish neighborhood. Conflict between Irishmen and natives escalated into full-scale gunfights, in which ten people were killed.

Benton pressed on, changing nothing that he stood for, still a national figure and the leader of many Democrats in Missouri. He served out his House term, which was to last until March 3, 1855. On one of his final days, February 27, he woke in his home on C Street and prepared himself for work. It was a bitterly cold day of the sort he had always found to be good for his lungs, and though the streets were icy, he no doubt had slept with his windows open as he always did. This would explain why he did not detect the faint smell of smoke in the house; when one of his daughters mentioned it, he dismissed it. He left the house at eleven o’clock in the morning, making the short walk he had taken thousands of times up the hill to the Capitol.

In the afternoon he was at work beneath the arched ceiling of the House of Representatives when a messenger told him his house was on fire. The news so startled lawmakers that the House halted most of its business, and many of them followed the seventy-two-year-old as he hurried back along frozen Pennsylvania Avenue toward C Street. They could do nothing when they arrived. A reporter watched Benton “standing in the crowd, looking, with others, on the blazing roof of his dwelling.” Jessie stood with him. Thinking back to the smoky smell his daughter had noticed, he decided that the woodwork near a defective chimney must have smoldered for days before spreading. The fire centered on his third-floor study, the location of all his books and the half-finished manuscript of a book he was writing. A fire company arrived, but water ran short and later froze in a hose. Nothing of value was saved from the house except, by chance, a portrait of Thomas Hart Benton as a young man. Once firefighters were able to enter, they went from room to room tossing furniture out the windows to reduce the fuel for the fire; a looking glass sailed out of a third-floor window and shattered on the street.

After a night of watching his house burn, Benton came with Jessie to her nearby house. “Neither of us had slept,” Jessie said, “but he made me lie down.” She was about six months pregnant, and he was more solicitous of her welfare than his own. Father and daughter “talked together as only those who love one another can talk after a calamity.” Of his lost possessions he said, “It is well, there is less to leave now—this has made death more easy.” After Congress adjourned a few days later, he returned to St. Louis, where the remains of his late wife had been sent for burial, and watched the gravediggers cover her coffin in Bellefontaine Cemetery. But in no other way did he act like he was ready for death. He began rewriting his lost manuscript and making plans to run again for elective office.

His son-in-law was considering his own future. John received promising news in early 1855. After years of litigation, the Supreme Court upheld his title to the Mariposa grant. Roger Taney, the chief justice, wrote the majority opinion in Frémont v. United States, which was considered a landmark case affirming the titles of many California landholders; it was said to cause “considerable rejoicing among the land claimants.” The news seemed to vindicate John’s refusal to sell the property, and brightened his prospects for enlarging his fortune. But he was being lured in another direction, toward what seemed like an even bigger opportunity, which soon became so appealing that John put off a planned trip to California.

A visitor was making regular appearances at the Frémont house in those days. Jessie identified him as Edward Carrington, a man related to the Bentons and to Jessie’s extended family—probably Edward Codrington Carrington Jr., from an old Virginia family in Botetourt County, just south of Jessie’s ancestral home. The elder Edward Codrington Carrington had served in the War of 1812, while Mrs. Edward Carrington of Botetourt County was raising funds to maintain George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon. The younger Mr. Carrington was a onetime student at Virginia Military Institute who volunteered for the war against Mexico, then in 1853 moved to Washington to practice law. He was twenty-nine, one of a number of men drawn into the Frémont orbit who were much closer in age to Jessie than to John; yet the visitor seemed to influence the older man. Do you not think, Carrington asked, that the time has come to restrict immigration? John agreed. Not that immigrants should be banned—but “indiscriminate immigration” would bring the problems of the crowded old world, because newcomers arrived “without a comprehension of American history and of their duties.” John endorsed the old nativist idea of limiting immigrants’ ability to vote, believing the foreign-born should be denied the franchise until they had been in the country twenty-one years. Young Carrington was delighted because, Jessie said, “he was a member of the Native American party.”

The view John had picked up was impossible to reconcile with his experience. His writings were streaked with tributes to men of different nationalities and cultures who not only knew the history of the country but had made history with him. (“It was a serious enterprise . . . to undertake a traverse of such a region, and with a party . . . of many nations—American, French, German, Canadian, Indian, and colored—and most of them young, several being under twenty-one years of age.”) It was, however, possible to reconcile skepticism of immigration with the moment in history and with his ambition. As the defeat of Benton suggested, anti-immigrant sentiment was the next big thing. Carrington was connected with other men in the nativist movement, who were thinking of “making an offer” to John, “looking towards his nomination as a Democratic candidate for the Presidency.”

THE POLITICAL POWER OF NATIVISM had grown since the Catholic church burnings in Philadelphia in 1844. The resistance to immigrants in the California goldfields, which Senator Frémont had tried to exploit in 1850 only to be damaged by it, was representative of the era. Some nativists founded secret societies with names such as the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner. They had secret handshakes and passwords. Entry-level members of the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner were not even told the name of the organization at first. (Newspapers nicknamed them the Order of Know-Nothings, because they claimed to know nothing when questioned about the order; junior members apparently were telling the truth.) More senior members of the order took an oath to use all legal means to “remove all foreigners, aliens or Roman Catholics from office.” The old nativist talking point that John repeated—that adult immigrants should wait twenty-one years to vote because newborn native children did—was a more polished form of such thinking, processed for mass consumption. By comparing immigrants to native children rather than other adults, the idea offered a memorable combination of illogic and grievance, making an arbitrary rule sound like it was based on reason, and positioning the equal treatment of immigrants as unfair to natives.

New waves of Irish Catholic immigration since the late 1840s had triggered fresh nativist grievances and energized the secret societies to reach for power. Professional politicians were unsure how to contain them, and quickly found that ignoring them didn’t work. When supporting Winfield Scott in 1852, the Whigs tried to compete with Democrats for the immigrant vote, but seemed to push away nativist Whig voters, losing more than they gained. Soon the nativists, temporarily abandoned by both parties, rose as a power all their own. The leader of a Know-Nothing order began giving public speeches in New York, while a nativist youth movement called themselves the Wide-Awakes and walked the streets wearing their own distinctive white felt hats. The Know-Nothings generated drama by engineering protests that seemed designed to provoke violence: five thousand of them escorted an anti-Catholic preacher through Brooklyn until they were battling with crowds of Irishmen—and a week later they repeated the process. A church was blown up in Dorchester, Massachusetts, while another was burned in Maine. In Washington, men broke into the construction site for the Washington Monument and stole a block of marble that had been donated by the pope for incorporation in the structure. They threw it in the Potomac River.

Thomas Hart Benton’s defeat in August 1854 by a Whig who was also a nativist set the pattern for other elections that fall. Some candidates ran openly under a Native American banner, while in other races nativists used their influence to nominate friendly candidates on both Whig and Democratic tickets. In Massachusetts, the Know-Nothings elected their candidate for governor—one of several governorships they eventually would control—and virtually the entire state legislature, as well as much of the congressional delegation. The order attracted ambitious political professionals, such as Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts, a Democrat, who survived the political hurricane and won reelection to his congressional seat in 1854 by welcoming nativist support.

Lawmakers who would not bend to the nativists were left politically homeless. One of them was Abraham Lincoln, a former Whig representative. In the summer of 1855 the Illinois lawyer received a letter from a friend asking where he stood. “That is a disputed point,” Lincoln replied.

I think I am a whig, but others say there are no whigs . . . I am not a Know-Nothing. This is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they made no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

Lincoln knew what he stood for—he spent much of 1855 organizing opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act in Illinois—but did not know where his efforts would lead.

Some Southern Democrats saw nativism as an issue that could bring them new Northern allies. Of course Democrats themselves were courting immigrants, but consistency was not the point. By raising the illusory dangers of immigrants, they could unite native-born voters from the North and South, distracting from the divisive question of what to do about black people.

A Democratic/Know-Nothing combination was what John’s friend Carrington proposed, and John seriously considered tying his fortune to this collection of misled patriots, bigots, and cynics. Carrington revealed himself as an emissary from a group of politicos who thought Frémont could be their presidential candidate. John B. Floyd, a former governor of Virginia, was said to be among the Frémont enthusiasts; so, too, was William Preston, another of Jessie’s politically active relations. In the summer of 1855, Floyd and other Democrats met John in New York at the St. Nicholas, a new luxury hotel on Broadway. Amid its “profusion of mirrors, gilding, tapestry, and crystal,” which reminded one visitor of “the palace of some Eastern prince,” John and his political suitors walked velvet-pile carpets and conferred across marble tables. The men suggested they could support John at the following year’s Democratic convention. Floyd and others also made clear that any Democrat must support the South, upholding the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. These were terms that John found “impossible . . . to accept.” The meeting broke up without agreement; John walked away doubting that he could work with the Southern men, who themselves walked away with a lower opinion of the great explorer. The Democrat Floyd later insisted that he was the one who had rejected John: “I . . . considered him very light metal (notwithstanding Mariposa,) and extremely ill-formed on all political subjects. . . . The influences which governed him were Abolition.”

John was indeed being influenced by antislavery forces, as was apparent by a friend he brought to the meeting: Nathaniel P. Banks, the Massachusetts Democratic congressman turned nativist. Banks was taken with the idea that John’s heroic reputation made him an ideal presidential candidate. But he was also an antislavery man, and triggered arguments by stating his views during the meeting; he may not have minded that the conference failed. Professional politicians such as Banks were puzzling over the problem of assembling a majority in a fragmented electorate. There was a very large proslavery vote. There was a very large nativist vote. It was hard to imagine winning a national election without pandering to one constituency or both. Yet there was also a very large antislavery vote, and some states had a substantial immigrant vote. How could a candidate attract any of these groups without fatally alienating others? Solving this problem would take the perfect blend of issues, words, and men. Clearly John’s friend Banks did not think the politicos at the St. Nicholas had the winning combination, though there might be other combinations available.

AFTER THE DEMOCRATIC CONFERENCE John visited his most important political adviser. He caught the relay of trains and boats northeastward toward Cape Cod and took a ferry to Nantucket Island. He passed through the wealthy old whaling town by the harbor, with its brick-and-glass storefronts and horses clattering on cobblestone streets, and crossed the sandy hills of the island toward the lighthouse at its far end. Jessie had taken the children there for the summer.

She was hoping the ocean air would help her recover from childbirth. A son had been born to the Frémonts on May 17, the third of their children to survive: Francis Preston Frémont, named in honor of Lizzie Lee’s father, Francis Preston Blair. Jessie and the children were staying at Siasconset, on the seaward point of the island; she wrote a letter to Lizzie saying it was a village of “old sailors and whaling captains” and their families, where four-year-old Charlie played with “a little crowd of boys who will inevitably go whaling in their turn.” The air was invigorating, the ocean beyond the lighthouse was awe-inspiring, and Jessie hated it. “I shall not begin to tell you how forlornly lonesome this island is,” she wrote Lizzie. For days they shared the house with a Quaker family, including grandchildren of the famed abolitionist Lucretia Mott. Jessie agreed with Mott about slavery but took offense at her self-righteous style: “Badly as she thinks of southern people I always thought worse of a ‘strong-minded’ speech making woman,” she said, and she was disappointed to find Mott’s relations to be as irritating as Mott.

John arrived a few days after Jessie mailed this letter. They went for a walk out to the Siasconset lighthouse, and he told her of the Democratic conference in New York. Despite its failure, John’s prospects seemed bright; Banks still favored him, and Jessie was able to report that John also had support from key politicos who had met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1855. One of the people at the meeting had gone on to stay on Nantucket near Jessie, and kept her posted on the Pennsylvanians’ efforts. Jessie concluded that John needed more advice, and when he departed Siasconset she sent a letter ahead to her newborn baby’s namesake, Francis Preston Blair.

My dear Mr. Blair,

Mr. Frémont has under consideration so important a step, that before taking it he wishes for the advice and friendly counsel which have heretofore proved so full of sagacity and led to such success. In talking of it together I offered to ask it from you again, and my own little judgment being favorable I almost ventured to promise your assistance.

Within days, Blair not only met with John but began drafting a platform of ideas on which he might run. The central plank was restoring the Missouri Compromise. From that moment, with characteristic energy, he became John’s principal political manager, guiding him toward an antislavery candidacy.

An observer in the 1850s described Blair as “a little old gentleman, thin, slender, and feeble in appearance,” who was “given a top-heavy appearance by the fact that his head is too big for his body, and his hat too big for his head.” When he doffed the hat, it revealed a nearly bald head. His eyes blazed with enthusiasm; he was a gregarious man, talented at making and keeping friends. He was also brilliant with words. In the 1820s he was a Kentucky court clerk, political partisan, and newspaper writer who worked to elect Andrew Jackson; in 1830 Jackson brought him to Washington. The Democratic Party founder installed him as the editor of the new Democratic newspaper, the Washington Globe, which Blair ran for fifteen years. He was Jackson’s voice and shameless promoter, recasting the stubborn, furious, half-dead old duelist as a colossus who shrugged off all attacks. (“The storms of faction beat around him unheeded,” Blair wrote early on. “The cloud rests upon him but a moment and leaves him more bright than before, towering in the sunshine of spotless honor and eternal truth.”) He became one of the newsmen in Jackson’s informal kitchen cabinet, then a permanent counselor to presidents, with a house across Pennsylvania Avenue from the executive mansion and an estate outside town called Silver Spring. He worked closely with Jackson’s successor, Van Buren, although more recent Democratic presidents had discarded him. He was still angry that Polk had removed him from the Globe (and, to Blair’s further fury, had changed the newspaper’s name to the Union, thus ending the Globe and erasing Blair’s legacy). Blair blamed slave interests for his political exile because, although he was a slave owner himself, he shared Benton’s dim view of slavery expansion. If he could find the right candidate in 1856 he could strike back and recover his influence.

At first Blair thought of running John as an independent Democrat, but he was drawn toward the Republicans. The new party was attracting converts, such as Seward, the once-discouraged Whig from New York, and Salmon P. Chase, an antislavery Democrat elected governor of Ohio in late 1855. Both had statewide political organizations behind them. Nathaniel Banks—once a Democrat, then a Know-Nothing—was drifting toward the new party, and Blair prepared for his own party switch while Jessie traded conspiratorial notes with him. She reported on the movements of “Mr. B,” which was how she referred to Banks, fearing that Democratic postmasters appointed by President Pierce were reading Blair’s mail. Banks was maneuvering to become Speaker of the House. In another letter she relayed a message from John: “I am told to tell you that satisfactory intelligence has been brought in from the east & west—the details are to be given you in your own library.”

In December, Blair wrote a letter to the Republican Association of Washington effectively pledging his support to the party. His shift made news, denounced in Democratic papers and embraced by Republicans. “I thank you from the bottom of my heart,” an Albany man wrote Blair, saying his link to the old Unionist Andrew Jackson “carries with it a prestige that you yourself may not be fully aware of.” Blair had been writing articles for John Bigelow, the editor of the New York Evening Post, and when Bigelow asked for a series of articles about prospective Republican candidates, Blair delivered a single article about John Charles Frémont. He drew Bigelow into the circle of Frémont advisers, and the circle gradually gained members such as Thurlow Weed, Seward’s political manager. He invited major party figures to a Christmas dinner at his home. Having been present at the creation of the Democratic Party in the early 1830s, Blair was present as the Republicans took shape.

The presidential campaign that now loomed would be a vast, boisterous, roaring affair of rallies, speeches, bonfires, songs, pamphlets, parades, articles, and insults—but that was for the candidate’s supporters, not the candidate. A presidential contender was supposed to rise above it all. No matter how desperately he was scheming for election, he was to pretend he wasn’t trying, but was merely answering the call of the people. A presidential candidate avoided giving speeches, and if compelled to speak tried not to say anything important; if forced to say something important, he would express it in a private letter to a friend that would be deliberately leaked to the newspapers. The Frémonts followed this template in the winter of 1855 to 1856. The closest they came to a public statement was when they changed their address, moving north to New York City, in a state that any Northern candidate must win. Jessie marveled at the New York amenities of their rented house on the Bowery (“water, fire, and gas all over,” she gushed), but they soon moved to a still more elegant address, a marble-fronted house at 56 West Ninth Street, near Washington Square.

John acted as though he was focused on exploration, not politics. After the move he unpacked containers holding carefully preserved metal plates, which were daguerreotypes—the images that Solomon Carvalho had captured during the 1853 to 1854 expedition across the Rockies. He carried the chemically treated metal plates to the studio of a New York photographer named Mathew Brady, and spent part of the winter having the images developed. Jessie set up a room in their house as an artist’s studio, where, by the light of a bay window, an oil painter and a woodcutter used the photos as the basis for images that could be reproduced in John’s next book.

Brady, the photographer, was in his early thirties, clean-shaven, with tiny spectacles and a stylish mass of dark hair. He was the son of Irish immigrants. As a youth, coming from upstate New York to study art in the city, he was introduced to the New York University professor Samuel F. B. Morse, who had just recently passed through his short career of railing against Catholics and foreign influence and was experimenting with daguerreotypes. Morse was generous in sharing his knowledge, and the young Irish-American gave him some credit for the direction of his later career. By the mid-1850s Brady had two studios on Broadway with multiple employees, and while developing John’s images he also arranged to take a portrait of his famous customer. John arrived wearing a light-colored suit. Brady posed him sitting sideways, with his left shoulder to the camera, and had John turn his head for a three-quarter view of the face. John was bearded, hair combed but curling around his ears. His face looked weathered and strong, though his expression hinted at a man who was vulnerable, hidden.

REPUBLICANS PLANNED A PRELIMINARY CONVENTION in February to better organize the party, followed by a presidential nominating convention in June. They had several potential candidates, though most had disadvantages. John McLean, a Supreme Court justice, wanted the nomination but had no real antislavery record. Chase of Ohio believed he had earned the nomination, but had too much of an antislavery record; managers of the antislavery party wanted a man who had not taken such strong positions that he could be painted as extremist. Seward wanted the nomination, but his political adviser, Thurlow Weed, counseled him to hold back: Seward had been supportive of Catholics and immigrants, so he must wait until 1860 in hopes that the nativist wave would recede. John’s short Senate career and long absences in the West during many political controversies made him a nearly ideal choice. Horace Greeley, who had brought his New York Tribune into the new party, said that “a candidate must have a slim record in these times.”

The Democrats nominated their candidate first, meeting in Cincinnati in May. Casting aside the unpopular President Pierce, they chose James Buchanan—the Bentons’ longtime neighbor, who escorted teenage Jessie at an 1840 wedding, and sent his frustratingly vague letter to John on the Pacific coast in 1846. Buchanan, the political survivor. He could win votes North and South—he had powerful Southern friends (he had been so close to William R. King, an Alabama senator, that one lawmaker referred to them as “Buchanan and his wife”) and could use his strong political organization to capture his home state of Pennsylvania. He had such vast government experience that few men had been so qualified on paper. Best of all, from the Democrats’ point of view, he was serving as ambassador to Britain, which meant that he had been absent for the Kansas-Nebraska Act. His positions could be trimmed as necessity required; the Democrats, too, wanted a man with “a slim record” on the issues that mattered most.

The Democrats and Republicans would be joined by a third party: the remnants of the Whigs were absorbed by a faction of Know-Nothings and rebranded the American Party. Meeting in Philadelphia, they nominated former Whig president Millard Fillmore. Their vice presidential choice reflected the fracturing political world: delegates selected Andrew Jackson Donelson, the former president’s nephew and adopted son. While the Democrats were the party of Jackson, and the Republicans had won over Blair and other acolytes of Jackson, the nativists nominated a Jackson; the dominant political movement of the past generation was split in three.

If John were nominated, then, he would be facing a deeply experienced presidential candidate and a former president. He needed to polish his own credentials. His principal qualification was his inspiring life story, and so Jessie began the critical work of gathering information for two writers who produced book-length campaign biographies. The most ambitious effort was by John Bigelow, the editor of the Evening Post, who in the spring and summer of 1856 was “obliged to apply to Mrs. Frémont for information about her husband’s parentage.” This created a problem: John’s illegitimate birth was deeply embarrassing, and Jessie did not want this fact printed. She traveled to Virginia to talk with John’s mother’s relations and find a presentable story, but only so much could be done. So Jessie became an uncredited coauthor, writing the first chapter of Bigelow’s book herself, offering a sympathetic version of Anne Pryor’s separation from her spouse (the much older husband was “repulsive,” Jessie reported), and adding the false claim that Anne divorced and remarried before John’s birth. Nowhere in the book was Jessie credited with this act of ghostwriting, although Bigelow acknowledged it more than half a century later in his memoirs. (He also seemed to confess to the falsehood at the heart of the chapter: “Her account of the colonel’s origin and early life was not as full as I desired, but it answered our purpose very well.”)

Another biography was to be written by Charles Upham, a former congressman. Jessie proofread Upham’s manuscript and saw a passage she disliked—a description of the young couple’s elopement in 1841. With playful formality she wrote a letter to the biographer, appealing to him in the third person:

Will Mr. Upham let my alterations stand? There was no “dash” [to get married]—it was done in sober sadness on my part and as sober judgment on Mr. Frémont’s.

An act of “sober judgment” would play better with the voting public, who might make judgments of their own about John rashly “dashing” off with Jessie when she was hardly more than a girl. The biographer apparently cut the section she disapproved; his published volume described the marriage in a few sentences and did not directly mention that it was an elopement.

More revisions were to come. Isaac Sherman, a politico attached to the campaign, wrote Upham to say he was troubled that the manuscript described the California gold-mining bill that Senator Frémont had proposed in 1850. Some of “our friends,” wrote Sherman, “doubt the propriety of making any observation on the Bill which legitimated Americans only to procure gold from the public lands. Could you forward that chapter by express to the Col. [on] 9th Street?” Republicans were aiming to co-opt nativists, but did not want their candidate to be one of the nativists, with their bigoted ideas and affection for violence. Upham forwarded the manuscript and soon received a note from Jessie Benton Frémont—it was in her hand, signed “J.B.”—regarding “the second section of the bill,” which limited gold-mining permits to citizens. Jessie liked not a word of the four pages Upham had devoted to it: “Decidedly, this ought to be struck out.” Upham complied. The published version of the biography mentioned other parts of the mining bill while ignoring the ban on noncitizens.

Jessie was becoming a campaign adviser despite a personal cost. Virtually all members of her family by blood or marriage were Southern, and if a few agreed with her views of slavery, virtually none approved of the new Northern party. According to Jessie, John understood that his candidacy would disrupt her personal relationships, and he said he would not proceed unless she consented. She did. “This ended my old life,” she said. “Except for my Father, and the one cousin, now and always our loving sister-friend, I was dropped by every relative.” Even some of her siblings cooled toward her. Her father agreed with her antislavery stance—yet her relationship with him had become the most fraught of all. In late 1855, as John began moving toward the presidency, it became clear that Thomas Hart Benton would not support him. Jessie could not persuade him. His old friend Francis P. Blair could not persuade him either. Benton would neither give political advice to his son-in-law nor endorse him. He said a sectional party would destroy the Union.

He had also come to doubt John’s ability. Jessie traced the break between them to the winter of 1851 to 1852, when Senator Benton had attempted to sell Las Mariposas (saying John was “not adapted to such business”) and John had revoked the sale. Benton also seemed unimpressed with John’s expedition in 1853 to 1854, even after John flattered him by saying it had borne out Benton’s vision for where the rail route should be found. By April 1856, relations were so strained that Jessie could not bear to see her father. Writing a letter from New York to her best friend, Lizzie Lee, she said, “I do not think I can go to Washington,” because her father would be there. “I have made one thing a fixed resolve—not to be hurt at heart any oftener than it is forced upon me—to go deliberately into agitation and pain is almost suicide.”

I know both my people too well ever to look for concession from either side. And with Father this is only the expression of years distrust of Mr. Frémont’s judgment. . . . I think Mr. Frémont could not have done otherwise than revoke [the Mariposas] sale. I know more facts than father did. Indeed Mr. Frémont would have had small respect for himself to allow of such an administration of his estate during his life. . . . I have written constantly to Father. I always tell him whatever I think may interest him—never saying politics—but for four months I have not had a line from him.

If Jessie thought her father had at last had found “a fair occasion” to express his old resentments, there was another possible explanation: Benton had worked with the most consequential presidents of his time, and did not see John among them. Benton, the old newspaperman, knew how much of his son-in-law’s reputation had been manufactured.

Jessie finally received a warm letter from her father, inviting her to Washington with the grandchildren. John and Blair encouraged her to go, still hoping she could recruit him. But she dreaded the meeting and allowed herself to be delayed several weeks before traveling. When at last she reached Washington she found her father was absent, having just caught a train toward Missouri.

BEFORE THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION, violent events gave new force to the party and to John’s efforts to lead it. First, the Kansas-Nebraska Act intensified the conflict between proslavery and antislavery forces. Missourians swept across the state border, seizing land and brushing aside Indians who had made their homes in Kansas. Some Missourians wanted profit from real estate, while others, led by the proslavery senator David Atchison, meant to make Kansas a slave state. Northern settlers arrived, some assisted by the New England Emigrant Aid Company. It had been founded by Eli Thayer, a Massachusetts politician and educator, who dreamed of colonizing Kansas as a free state. Pro- and antislavery settlers established separate towns along the Kansas River and traded gunshots. Proslavery territorial governors appointed by President Pierce failed to keep order, and Charles Robinson, an agent of the Emigrant Aid Company, claimed that he was governor.

John knew Robinson. He had been in California during the gold rush, becoming a leader in sometimes-violent battles over land ownership and supporting John’s failed Senate reelection in 1851. John’s managers sensed an opportunity to make John a part of the Kansas story by writing a supportive letter to his friend, designed to fall into the hands of news editors. The letter to Robinson in April recounted John’s Senate defeat in a way that artfully suggested, without evidence, that he had lost because of his antislavery beliefs.

We were defeated then, but that contest was only an incident in the great struggle—the victory was deferred, not lost. You have carried to another field [Kansas] the same principle, with courage and ability. . . . I can only say that I sympathize cordially with you, and that as you stood by me firmly and generously when we were defeated by the nullifiers in California, I have every disposition to stand by you in your battle with them in Kansas.

In a few sentences John recast himself as an antislavery fighter and connected himself to a radical voice in Kansas. Newspapers across the country reprinted the letter. The Washington Star, critical of the Republicans, added a sneering commentary: the letter would have been more “complete if it had given the world the Colonel’s opinion upon ‘the equality of the races.’” Democrats claimed “black Republicans” favored social equality for African Americans. But Republicans praised the letter, which fixed attention on Robinson just before his story took a dark turn. Weeks later, federal authorities arrested the would-be governor and accused him of treason, a charge that made national headlines and marked him as an antislavery martyr.

Kansas received even more attention when a proslavery sheriff linked with David Atchison led a party of gunmen into the settlement of Lawrence, which had been founded by free-soil settlers. The gunmen sacked the offices of an antislavery newspaper called the Herald of Freedom and threw its printing press in the Kansas River. They burned a building called the Free State Hotel and torched the houses of residents. It took a few days for fleeing residents to carry the story to the nearest telegraph office, from which it almost instantly reached Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, more than a thousand miles away. Greeley spared no ink: Lawrence had been “devastated and burned to ashes by the Border Ruffians,” the label given to proslavery gunmen from Missouri. “A few bare and tottering chimneys, a charred and blackened waste, now mark the site [attacked by the] myrmidons of Border-Ruffianism, intent on the transformation of Kansas into a breeding ground and fortress of Human Slavery.” Antislavery activists in Kansas struck back. John Brown, a New Englander whose messianic opposition to slavery had led him to join a free-state militia in Kansas, slipped away from the militia to conduct a retaliatory raid on his own authority. Moving at night, at the head of a small group of loyalists that included four of his sons, they rounded up five proslavery settlers and executed them.

By then the dispute over Kansas had triggered political violence in Washington itself. Republican senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts delivered a lengthy talk in May on what he called the crime of Kansas. In an especially withering passage, he mocked a South Carolina senator named Andrew Butler for his “incoherent phrases” and “the loose expectoration of his speech” while opposing Kansas as a free state. “There was,” Sumner said, no “possible deviation from truth which he did not make.” Senator Butler was not present for this tirade, but Butler’s nephew learned of the speech afterward and considered it an insult to his family. The nephew, Preston Brooks, was a member of the House of Representatives. He walked across the Capitol to the Senate chamber, found Sumner writing at his desk, and beat him again and again with a heavy cane until he was unconscious. Brooks kept thrashing him even after the cane broke into pieces over Sumner’s head.

Now that the conflict had reached one of the principal media centers, the country learned of every detail. The telegraph and daily newspapers allowed people across vast distances to read about the caning almost simultaneously, and to read daily updates as further facts became known. Nothing like this would have been possible a decade earlier. Of course the news was filtered through Northern and Southern editors, which meant Northerners and Southerners were simultaneously reading different versions of the same event. A witness quoted in a Chicago newspaper said Sumner was ambushed, “hemmed in” at his desk and beaten mercilessly until he “had by a great effort torn [his] desk from its fastenings, and then he pitched forward insensible on the floor.” A correspondent for South Carolina’s Charleston Courier all but rolled his eyes. “The telegraph has already spread a thousand and one stories about this transaction,” he wrote, many of them “incorrect.” Sumner “was beaten, it is true, but not so badly . . . he is not seriously hurt. His whole speech was of a character very irritating to Southern men.”

The partisan reporting played to, and likely reinforced, partisan attitudes. A paper in Columbia, South Carolina, declared that Brooks had “the hearty congratulations of the people of South Carolina for his summary chastisement of the Abolitionist Sumner.” South Carolinians held public meetings to vote Brooks resolutions of thanks and a “handsome gold headed cane,” while a woman from his congressional district promised to send “hickory sticks, with which to chastise Abolitionists.” It was even alleged that “the slaves of Columbia” had taken up a “subscription” to buy Brooks a gift for his “protection in their rights and enjoyments as the happiest laborers on the face of the globe.”

As quickly as the telegraph had spread the news of the caning everywhere, it spread the Southern reaction across the North. Readers of the New York Herald unfolded their papers to discover extended excerpts of the Southern press praising “chivalrous” Brooks for beating “the poltroon Senator of Massachusetts.” And this was a new phenomenon in itself. Masses of Americans learned not only of a disturbing event more rapidly than ever before but also that other Americans celebrated the very event that horrified them. While editors had always reprinted opposing views to demonstrate how wrong they were, the telegraph allowed them to do so with unprecedented speed and force. Northern Democrats immediately began reporting declines in support for their party, while more Northern voters began turning to Republicans. Even those who did not feel strongly about the freedom of slaves cared about the freedom of speech, and Sumner’s caning in response to his words was seen as the latest evidence that the South would never tolerate that freedom. “Has it come to this,” asked John Bigelow’s Evening Post, “that we must speak with bated breath in the presence of our Southern masters? . . . Are we too, slaves, slaves for life, a target for their brutal blows, when we do not comport ourselves to please them?” The Constitution and the country seemed in danger. As the Republican convention neared, the party’s 1856 campaign began to take on the character of a righteous cause.